


Isolation (the feeling isn't new).

by orphan_account



Series: Fullmetal Femslash February 2014 [9]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Femslash, Femslash Challenge 2014, Femslash February, Post-Canon, War Crimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-10
Updated: 2014-02-10
Packaged: 2018-01-11 20:07:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tonight, she is alone.</p><p>The feeling isn’t new.</p><p>Snowflakes cling to the edges of her vision, washing away the darkness into fading white. Once upon a time she willingly stepped into the icy deluge, the frigid waters tearing her flesh from her skeleton to reveal a raging blizzard within. The manilla envelope containing her transfer unleashed the winds that swept over Drachma and pushed Amestris into a position of blood-smeared power over the mountain-daggers piercing the thin sky. The isolation comforted her, fed her, became her. In the summits her bones hardened to permafrost. Or so she thought.</p><p>Then the Promised Day drew her to the heat of power, to the heart of the volcano whose far-off spouts of ash and burning smoke she had seen from the peaks of her glaciers. The hardened permafrost had hidden away a consequence.</p><p>Brittle.</p><p>Brittle bones that appeared to glitter like immortal diamond but which snapped under the slightest pressure, under the lightest touch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Isolation (the feeling isn't new).

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Femslash February. Prompt B5 on my bingo card, "Poor Communication Skills".
> 
> Hawkeye would have given Black Hayate to Fuery, for those of you wondering.
> 
> Unbeta'd/unedited/etc. Enjoy at your own risk!

Tonight, she is alone.

The feeling isn’t new.

Snowflakes cling to the edges of her vision, washing away the darkness into fading white. Once upon a time she willingly stepped into the icy deluge, the frigid waters tearing her flesh from her skeleton to reveal a raging blizzard within. The manilla envelope containing her transfer unleashed the winds that swept over Drachma and pushed Amestris into a position of blood-smeared power over the mountain-daggers piercing the thin sky. The isolation comforted her, fed her, became her. In the summits her bones hardened to permafrost. Or so she thought.

Then the Promised Day drew her to the heat of power, to the heart of the volcano whose far-off spouts of ash and burning smoke she had seen from the peaks of her glaciers. The hardened permafrost had hidden away a consequence.

Brittle.

Brittle bones that appeared to glitter like immortal diamond but which snapped under the slightest pressure, under the lightest touch. Under the roughened fingertips of a woman who had carried the weight of a decade-long genocide smelted, forged, and concentrated into fourteen kilograms of steel rifle and lead bullet on her shoulders for years, her bones shattered whole in that damned lieutenant’s ugly, beautiful hands. Hands: Two creases along the palms, one creeping in from either side with the left slightly higher than the right, the outer crease branching out into a line straight as the woman’s rise through the promoted ranks and into a loop that traced the pad of the thumb and ended at the wrist. The final segment, middle finger of her right hand was larger than that of the left, a swelled cushion to cradle the pen Riza Hawkeye had used to forge indolent superiors’ signatures and fill out fellow soldiers’ paperwork for years or the trigger of the waist-clipped gun she removed most often whether practising in the galley or murdering those who in another story or in another life could have been the protagonists murdering _her_. The fingernails kept meticulously clipped to blunt crescent moons that caught on nothing as they outlined beating hearts. The distincts sensations of the left hand versus the right. The thin scar running down from between her right index and middle fingers to a few centrimetres below her wrist from a knife slash. The puckered reddish welt in the centre of her left palm where a bullet bit through her skin and exited her life just as rapidly, narrowing her world to a blade’s edge of pain for a single snapshot frostburning agony into Riza Hawkeye’s retinas. Not unlike the Ice Queen herself. Those hands have cradled her in the dead of the still night to render her glaciers asunder in lightning bolts of toes curling and muscles tightening and tendons straining on straps and sinews rippling from pleasure thundering across her skin to rush warm water into the frozen pool of her soul. Now those hands clasp a silken flower between them, pale and worn around the false stem greened so as not to require the sunlight Riza Hawkeye would never see again.

She sought to add, _so long as Riza Hawkeye lived_ , but not even she could be so cruel.

Tonight, she is alone. Through the open window, bared where before she would have shut out the cold with the now-broken latch, the moon is a scythe harvesting the lights of the stars. “ _DId you know,”_ Riza Hawkeye murmured once over a game of chess conducted between straps of leather and binding scraps of cloth, “ _that when you look out at the skies, some of the stars have already gone out?_ ”

“ _Have you been talking to the ponyboy?_ ” she hissed in response, never once considering that then she had gazed upon a star already out, a star whose final sputterng of gold would reach her years later, a star whose brilliant zenith she had never seen and the eventual falling-apart of which she drown in a glass of vodka strong enough for her to awaken the following night in the makeshift hospital of her lieutenant colonel’s rental. The damn bottle was vintage and maybe so was she.

“ _The ‘ponyboy’_ is _my superior officer. Of course I have._ ”

Riza Hawkeye opened the day by preparing coffee, walking her dog for precisely fifteen minutes, scanning through the daily paper for news of the election, inking in the lines of the crossword and sliding over the sudoku for her not-quite-lover to peruse amid breakfast, and driving to work in that shitty military-assigned black automobile that she steadfastly refused to replace as though a piece of her soul had become lodged in the sputtering engines and the shudder-spinning tires. Riza Hawkeye enjoyed spending the better half of her lunch beginning her afternoon paperwork and wasting the last few minutes lingering around her favoured areas of Central, pouring a hot cup of coffee for General Mustang in the manner to which he was accustomed with just the precise splash and a half of milk and enough sugar to kill an elephant, checking in on the Ice Queen with a smile that melted the ice accumulated over the frigid morning. Riza Hawkeye preferred her left leg over her right knee. Riza Hawkeye preferred white wine to red, preferred wine to beer, preferred whiskey to wine and to vodka the same. Riza Hawkeye had learned to mix shots from Rebecca Catalina, whom the Ice Queen absorbed into her flock immediately. RIza Hawkeye loved chocolate cake beyond any other dessert. Riza Hawkeye went to bed after answering exactly six telephone calls, one from each of the men on Mustang’s inner team and from Catalina; downing _one_ mild shot of whiskey, no more and no less, prepared exactly identically every time; and kissing her dog and her not-quite-lover good night each.

“ _When General Mustang is elected Führer, the criminals of the Ishvalan War will pay._ ”

“ _That includes you, Riza_.” Vibrating throat, light tongue flutter just under her front teeth.

Her not-quite-lover gripped her hand with an intensity that ground her knuckles together and ached her bones to the twinging elbow. “ _Promise me, Olive. Promise me that if you’re elected, you’ll do the same. The trials._ ”

“ _We’re war heroes. They’ll never find us guilty._ ”

“ _Promise me._ ”

Two gazes fixed upon one another until she snipped the threads connecting them. She’d never been able to do that prior: The frost upon the strings had held fast, but now her knife cleaved through moistened threads easily as through the soft hollow of a man’s throat. When she caught the wheeling, half-floating headless serpents in her outstretched palms, she recognised her sins: heartstrings. Cut. Silenced.

“ _I promise_.”

Tonight, she is alone. Until recently her not-quite-lover had been a turn of the head away, then a phone call away, then a long and lonely drive to the office where her not-quite-lover worked overtime as the election loomed. The two darlings of the charismatic Roy Mustang and the powerful Olivier Mira Armstrong neck and neck in the polls. Pundits claimed the election would come down to whether the nation proved racist or more sexist, whether the white men of Amestris would sooner bow down to a Xingese man or to a white woman. “ _Can’t we separate business and pleasure?_ ” she asked around the premium cut of smoked salmon in the fancy restaurant that made her want to throw up in the back and take a lengthy, dirty smoke to coat herself in ash and dust again to rid herself of the imposed beauty, of the sparkles settling on her skin, of the gorgeous light that defined her all the more as the filthy son of a bitch she is. She needed, _needs_ the thick ice around her to blind those who view her, particularly her not-quite-lover, so that they never look deeper, so that they never see the frozen mud around which she had sewn her skin of snow, like a selkie from the ancient legends, unable to return to the north without her false flesh.

Riza Hawkeye finished her meal with punctuated exactness and placed her fork next to the plate. Glancing up, her eyes ringed with the violet of exhaustion, her not-quite-lover leaned forward. “ _Armstrong,_ ” her not-quite-lover said, and the Ice Queen nearly bit off her tongue because her family name carried the heaviness of a scythe moon crashing into the Earth and the rising oceans spilling over the land and the mountains submerged and drowning in the tidal pull of the woman whose mouth opened in an _oo_ and whose throat vibrated with the sound, “ _you of all people should know that business and pleasure are always intertwined, that you started sleeping with me to gain a foothold into the general’s dealings, only to fall in love with me._ ”

“ _Hawkeye, that was years ago. As always, you’re welcome to join the Briggs team; I’ll certainly promote you, and then you wouldn’t have to continue this game of conflicting loyalties._ ”

“ _There are no conflicting loyalties. I promised General Mustang that I would follow him into Hell, as I would follow you. But his path to Hell is much longer than yours. I’ve known him since I was a child, and I’ve only known you for four years._ ”

She wiped her mouth on a napkin that came away smeared with pink lipstick. On second thought she honestly should have used the scarlet, but she’s always been a damn fool stupid enough to claw through her chest for her enemy, pulling back the pulsating curtains of muscle and tissue to indicate just where her heart rests. Perhaps next time she should reach out. Steady her enemy’s arm and demonstrate the ideal angle for stabbing her overworked heart to burst a river of gore spanning years of isolation. “ _I see._ ”

“ _Now, I really need to finish calculating this month’s advertising budget for the campaign. You know how difficult those calculations are. I’m sorry to cut this dinner early._ ” Checking the watch on her left wrist, always so precisely timed that the sharpness of the clock’s hands could slice her prey into ribbons far before a gun could be drawn, Riza Hawkeye frowned visibly. “ _I suppose I could stay for dessert_.”

Her not-quite-lover stayed for dessert. Chocolate cake, no frills, punctual and practical, as their relationship had always been. At the end Riza Hawkeye adjusted her tuxedo jacket, kissed her good-bye, and paid for her portion. For once, she hesitated on the threshold as if teetering secretly. Conscious of the narrowing tightrope of their strained relationship. In that instant she distinctly remembers feeling the _gravity_ of the black box in her pocket, of the thin gold band contained within the velvety plush, a soft fantasy so far removed from the cold, _real_ world of Briggs, the metal gold as the fire of her hair and the diamond hard and eternal as the ice of the north.

Yet then again diamonds require heat and pressure to remain diamonds. In the languidity of the easier world even the hardest diamond transforms, however slowly, to frail graphite that rubs upon everything it meets, that marks upon minds and hearts alike, that dismantles itself to leave a legacy.

Perhaps therein lies the great paradox of love. Perhaps to write upon the heart and soul of one’s lover, one has to break down one’s own diamond into graphite. Strength into weakness. Steel into porcelain.

She felt the weight. Her not-quite-lover hesitated on the point of no return. Waited. And, at last, passed. For she could no longer move her limbs that had become frostbitten, had become harsh as ice, had become leaden down with snow.

Once upon a time the snow tasted of a fresh start, freedom salvation, liberation, an open expanse of a horizon that could never choke her within the force of societal standards again. The cold buried the revealing dress from her wardrobe and kissed the furred coat she wore as a second skin, as a built-in façade, as a wall between herself and the outside world necessitated by her queendom. Here the thin air and biting chill would smite those who illumined their own weakness. Here she would be strong in her frozen _no, brittle_ bones, frosted _no, frail_ flesh, icy _no, deadened_ heart.

But tonight the snow tastes of naught but the inhuman being which she has tried to emulate for years and which has ultimately slipped from her fingers in copious streams of grey-tinged crimson that splattered the dusty ground to pool thickly below the corpse freshly executed by firing squad. She still isn’t sure if the blood was hers or _hers_ , if the blood burst from her heart or from _hers_.

Tonight, she is alone. Tonight the cold seeping in through the open window trails glowing motes of dust amid the perfect snow: Not even the sheer white of winter, of the most ideal isolation in the dying world, of the frozen walls curving up above and beyond the desert of bone fragments and crystallised blood that swept over the bosom of Ishvala to drown the very people who had believed only to reach the borders of Amestris years later, could escape from the contamination of age and death and expectations torn and twisted beyond recognition. The star with its final burst of light.

But she won’t be alone for long.

She raises her chin, flurries of snow blurring the edges of her faded world, and turns from the window. The cold never bothers her, yet tonight, her mantle offers no protection, no shield from the torrentous emotion within, no aegis against the flower of fire blooming somewhere between her lungs, boiling her blood to a finite vapour that escapes with every pained breath, draining her ribs and spine to weaken her bone to a fragile glass that swirls with the dredges of the vintage vodka of her grief. The fire consumes her whole. Leaves nothing in its wake, not even a smouldering coal or a smoking ash. She’s gone. Eaten alive from the inside-out. The schedule on her desk sings of the crucifixion of Riza Hawkeye and of the salvation of her not-quite-lover, for _lover_ implies an emotion the Ice Queen could never feel.

Riza Hawkeye. Tried for war crimes in the Ishval War of Extermination. Found guilty. Executed April 2, 1920. Olivier Mira Armstrong. Tried for war crimes in the Ishval War of Extermination. Found guilty. To be executed April 4, 1920. Her mouth curls from the irony.

Spring. Winter melting, slushing, pooling frigid tears. Icebergs splintering like the bones of the injured. Rivers swelling like the bloated bodies of the deceased. White-capped mountains staining dirt-brown like the life of an Ice Queen coming to an end in a blaze of final fire.

Winter was coming. Winter came. And now winter has left.

Tonight, she is alone. But by sunset tomorrow she won’t be anymore.


End file.
